Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire

A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award--winning historian.Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam.

But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East.